A Dominie's Log

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

"Teachers in slum districts should point out to the children that most of their food is adulterated. Most of their boots are made of paper. Most of their clothes are made of shoddy."

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The best thing I have found in the Code is the section on the teaching of English. I fancy it is the work of J. C. Smith, the Editor of the Oxford Spenser. I used to have him round at my classes; he was a first-rate examiner. If a class had any originality in it he drew it out. But I never forgave J. C. Smith for editing Much Ado About Nothing. He made no effort to remark on the absurdity of the plot and motives. To me the play is as silly as Diplomacy or Our Boys.

"No grammar," says the Code, "should be taught until written composition begins." I like that, but I should re-write it thus: "No grammar should be taught this side the Styx."

Grammar is always changing, and the grammar of yesterday is scrapped to-day. A child requires to know how to speak and how to write correctly. I can write passably well, and when I write I do not need to know whether a word is an adjective or an adverb, whether a clause is a noun clause or an adverbial clause of time modifying a certain verb ... or is it a noun? Society ladies speak grammatically (I am told), and I'm quite sure that not three people in the Row could tell me whether a word is a verb or an adverb (I shouldn't care to ask). The fact that I really could tell what each word is makes absolutely no difference to me. A middle-class boy of five will know that the sentence "I and nurse is going to the Pictures" is wrong.

But I must confess that grammar has influenced me in one way. I know I should say "Whom did you see?" but I always say "Who did you see?" And I used to try not to split my infinitives until I found out that you can't split an infinitive; "to" has nothing to do with the infinitive anyway.

I want to abolish the terms Subject, Predicate, Object, Extension, Noun, Verb, &c. I fancy we could get along very well without them. Difficulties might arise in learning a foreign tongue. I don't know anything about foreign tongues; all I know is the Greek alphabet and a line of Homer, and the fact that all Gaul is divided into three parts. Yet I imagine that one could learn French or German as a child learns a language.

Good speaking and writing mean the correct use of idiom, and idiom is the best phrasing of the best people—best according to our standards at the present time.